They’ve all got opinions on the trial of the year

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The circus comes to town, screamed the headline in the Johannesburg papers,
and you can see why.

The Oscar Pistorius trial was never going to slip under the radar: not when it
combines a sporting hero, his beautiful but dead girlfriend, and — crucially
for South Africans, if mostly forgotten here — intense scrutiny of a widely
mistrusted law and order system. To anyone who remembers O. J. Simpson, the
general air of murder as primetime entertainment is unedifyingly familiar.
What’s changed, however, is that this time not just the protagonists but
their gawping audience are live on camera.